"At the end of the town the ragged man thrust his head over a low wall. He seemed greatly relieved, and picking up the bucket, we two started on a run for my lodgings. Before I went to bed that night he had mixed up the dry plaster in his bucket and taken the cast. He wanted to keep the matrix, but I wouldn't have it. I did not want his dirty fingers feeling around her lovely face, and so I paid him his blood money and pounded the mould out of shape. The next morning I left Ravenna for Paris. "You see now, messieurs, what a disreputable person I am." Here he rose from his seat and walked back to the bas-relief. "And yet, most blessed of women"--and he raised his eyes as if in prayer--"I think I would do it all over again to have you where you could always listen to my sins." VIII CONTAINING SEVERAL EXPERIENCES AND ADVENTURES SHOWING THE WIDE CONTRASTS IN LIFE How it began I do not remember, for nothing had led up to it except, perhaps, Le Blanc's arrival for dinner half an hour late, due, so he explained, to a break in the running gear of his machine, most of which time he had spent flat on his back in the cold mud, monkey-wrench in hand, instead of in one of our warm, comfortable chairs. No sooner was he seated at my side and his story told than we fell naturally to discussing similar moments in life when such sudden contrasts often caused us to look upon ourselves as two distinct persons having nothing in common each with the other. Lemois, whose story of the stolen Madonna the previous night had made us eager for more, described, in defence of the newly launched theory, a visit to a Swiss chalet, and the sense of comfort he felt in the warmth and coseyness of it all, as he settled himself in bed, when just as he was dozing off a fire broke out and in less than five minutes he, with the whole family, was shivering in a snow-bank while the house burned to the ground. "And a most uncomfortable and demoralizing change it was, messieurs--one minute in warm white sheets and the next in a blanket of cold snow. What has always remained in my mind was the rapidity with which I passed from one personality to another." Brierley, taking up the thread, described his own sensations when, during a visit to a friend's luxurious camp in the Adirondacks, he lost his way in the forest and for three days and nights kept himself alive on moose-buds and huckleberries. "Poor grub when you have been living on porter-house steak and lobsters from Fulton Market and peaches from South Africa. Time, however, didn't appeal to me as it did to Lemois, but hunger did, and I have never looked a huckleberry in the face since without the same queer feeling around my waistband."